As the election drew near, many political and stats junkies (like me) became fans of Nate Silver, aka @fivethirtyeight, the shrewd political number-cruncher and blogger for the New York Times. His way of aggregating the most reliable presidential polls into megapolls, and factoring in those polls' historical accuracies, was considered by some to be as revolutionary as the introduction of "Moneyball" -- or use of undervalued stats -- on baseball.
This isn't just about politics -- this is about rational decision making. Kind of like they had the ability to make the 6 million dollar man, we now have better insights into decision-making. If only people, organizations, and governments would start to value intellectualism again! But selling intellectualism in industry is sometimes hard because "academics" don't understand the real world. Selling intellectualism to the masses is viewed as some kind of liberal conspiracy. Selling intellectualism to the government...well, it's a bureaucracy -- it doesn't like logic.
In the end, it's time to embrace the reality -- we need smart people to run the country. Not everyone's smart. Not everyone is good at decision-making. It's now time to critically evaluate our relative skills and attributes!
